Seventeen-year-old Christine Michele Jones, who had graduated from a high school in Anchorage, Alaska, lived in an upscale home in Boulder Heights northwest of the University of Colorado campus in Boulder. While preparing to attend college that fall, she worked as a sales clerk at Montgomery Ward.

Christine decided it was a good day to wash her Toyota in a canyon stream in Left Hand Canyon.

She dressed in a blue T-shirt, faded blue jeans and sandals that Thursday morning.

Christine told her father, Dennis Jones, and stepmother, Catherine, she was going to go clean her car at the stream. It was about 9:30 a.m. when she left the home at 220 Deer Trail Road.

She loaded a bucket and soap and cleaning supplies into her light blue car and drove northeast on Deer Trail Road a few blocks to Lee Hill Drive.

Christine turned left onto Lee and drove a little more than a mile until she reached Left Hand Canyon Drive.

A bridge at the intersection crosses over a stream in a canyon between Nugget and Hill mountains. It’s there that she began washing her car.

A few hours later, her parents realized Christine had not returned home from washing her car.

They were immediately concerned and drove down to the stream to look for her. Christina’s stepbrother also went to help search.

In the police video of a 2007 interview, Det. Martin Vigil could be seen shifting in his chair.

What the camera didn’t show was that, beneath the table, Vigil had just kicked his superior officer, Sgt. Benito Trujillo.

This week during the trial of James Nathan Scott in Denver District Court, Vigil explained why he boldly kicked his boss.

Vigil testified that he had a strong intuitive feeling during the interview with Scott on Sept. 19, 2007 that the serial rapist was about to confess to a rape and murder in a Denver church 28 years earlier of 19-year-old Martha Guzman. Vigil could see by looking closely at Scott’s face that Scott was about to reveal himself.

“Det. Vigil was right and indeed Mr. Scott started to confess immediately after Det. Vigil kicked Sgt. Trujillo under the table in the interview room,” deputy district attorney Dawn Weber wrote in response to questions by The Denver Post about the trial.

If Vigil hadn’t kicked Trujillo and the sergeant had interrupted the suspect, Scott may never have confessed to murder and a jury a few days ago might never have found Scott guilty of first degree murder.

Most cold cases, and certainly those that happened decades ago, are only solved with DNA evidence. In this instance, the killer’s own words were used against him by a clever detective.

“It was crucial to the re-filing of the case,” Weber wrote in a reply to The Denver Post. “The confession provided an anchor around which we could argue all of the evidence in the case that corroborated the confession.”

The confession helped ensure belatedly that justice could be served in a case that stunned Denver at a time when such shocking murders were virtually unheard of, said Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey.

When her daughter was divorced in 1983, 50-year-old Patricia Louise Smith moved with her daughter and two young grandchildren to a Green Mountain townhome. She wanted to help them adjust from their rural existence in Oshkosh, Neb. to the more fast-paced lifestyle in a big metropolitan area.

Patricia Smith, 50

It wasn’t an unusual gesture by the self-sacrificing Smith. Her daughter Chery (Sherry) Lettin, then 29, considered her mother her best friend.

The cheerful, loving woman was adored by her 6-year-old granddaughter Amber Reese and her 4-year-old grandson Joe Reese. The woman, who never spoke a harsh word, brightened all of their lives at a very traumatic time.

She wasn’t just staying for a short time, either. Smith left her farm semi-permanently while her husband, Oliver Henry Smith, kept his Nebraska government job. Smith started her own home interior design business. Her husband would often visit on weekends.

Smith, her daughter, and two grandchildren rented a townhome at 12610 W. Bayaud Ave. in Lakewood. After 3 1/2 months they had established a routine. Smith and Lettin would drive Amber to school for Kindergarten and Joe to a church day-care center.

Smith would then drive her daughter to a bus station on 6th Avenue and then drive to work. In the evening the process was reversed. Smith was very punctual and dependable. She always was waiting for her daughter at the bus station.

But on the evening of Jan. 10, 1984, she wasn’t there. That was very odd. Chery waited and waited. She called her mother’s home phone repeatedly but no one answered.

It got dark and cold. Finally Chery called her cousin Valerie, who picked Chery up at the bus station. Together they rushed to the church daycare, where she picked up both of her children after a friend took Amber there when school let out.

When they drove into the driveway of the townhome, Lettin saw flickering reflections on her mother’s upstairs bedroom window. It was apparent the TV was on. Her mother’s car was in the driveway. It was very strange.

Up to and including her last moments, pain and strife marked every phase of Lorraine Pacheco’s life.

Yet the horrific events didn’t stop the blind woman from inviting people into her tiny apartment, pounding on her bongo drums, drawing beautiful pictures, giving advice about fixing car engines and marrying and having a child.

Her pleasant disposition meant there weren’t many strangers on her block, where she lived in an old apartment building near the north end of the old Mile High Stadium.

Pacheco’s family believes on the evening she died in mid May 1997, she invited her killer into her home with her warm smile.

A pretty 16-year-old Lakewood teen ran away from home in late February 1971.

Pamela Ann Williams’ body was discovered in another county weeks later.

Williams had lived with her parents and siblings at 1540 S. Carr St.

Pamela Williams

She was last seen alive by family on Feb. 27, 1971.

Williams was reported as a runaway shortly after.

Then on March 8, train engineer Ed Marsh was in a passing train when he spotted the body of the partially clothed girl.

Williams’ body was found dumped in bushes near Colorado 2 and E. 104th Avenue.

She had been shot twice in the right temple with a small-caliber gun, according to a March 9, 1971 Denver Post article.

She had been wearing a blue ski jacket and a purple dress. One of her shoes was found at the scene.

Adams County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Candi Baker has previously said homicide investigators recently sent DNA evidence from the case to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for testing but no matches were made with any suspects.

Investigators have followed every lead they get in the case, Baker said.

In retrospect, it was such a trivial argument following a happy, yet also very long and exhausting family celebration.

Mary Lynn Vialpando

But it would have lasting repercussions for Mary Lynne Renkel Vialpando, her husband and their child.

The argument and Mary’s reaction to it, would put her in the path of a rapist and killer in the early morning hours of June 5, 1988 in Old Colorado City in West Colorado Springs.

It was the worst kind of chance.

The day before, Vialpando, 24, and her husband Robert had gone with family to Pueblo for the spring wedding of Robert’s brother and sister-in-law.

When the Vialpandos returned home early the next morning and Robert invited his brother and sister inside their house, Mary Lynne was livid.

The home she shared with her husband and 4-year-old daughter was messy.

The young mother had to juggle caring for her daughter and studying for sports medicine classes at Denver Technical University, and Mary Lynne was embarrassed to have company in her home, according to her sister, Cynthia Renkel, who lives in Parker.

Early that morning she dashed outside on foot. She was last seen by her family running away from her home on the 2200 block W. Kiowa St.

It’s unclear what she was doing, whether she had any plans to go somewhere in particular or was just running off steam.

The athletic woman was not afraid to venture out that late, not in an area only about four blocks from where she was raised and where everyone who lived there knew each other, Renkel said.

Witnesses later told police that they saw her try to enter the bar Thunder and Buttons, 2415 W. Colorado Ave., but she did not have any money and couldn’t pay the cover charge, she said.

She then dashed in and out of Roger’s Bar, 2520 W. Colorado Ave., and walked west from the bar onto the north alley between 2:30 a.m. and 3 a.m., according to Renkel and a Colorado Springs police report.

“She walked through the front door and out the back,” Renkel said.
People who live near the alley later told police they heard a woman scream that night.

“Nobody did anything about it,” Renkel said.

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Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.